You have invested a lot of time in building product messages, designing logos, and websites, and implementing digital marketing activities for your business. However, if your products lack alignment and consistency, you may be lacking a Brand Guideline. What is a brand guideline? In today’s article, Optimal Agency will help you find the answer to this question!
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What is a brand guideline?
Brand Guideline known as brand guide, is an important document that helps businesses maintain consistency and uniformity in brand promotion and communication. This is a detailed guide on how to design and use brand elements such as logos, packaging, media publications, websites, and marketing campaigns.
A Brand Guideline is often presented in the form of a book or digital document, providing clear guidance on building and developing a business’s communications program. This document not only includes design regulations such as logo usage, colors, and typography but also instructions on how to coordinate and integrate these elements into marketing campaigns communication materials, and other information.
Brand Guideline helps ensure that all brand promotional materials and activities follow a consistent set of standards, thereby creating uniformity in brand identity. This is very important because it helps customers easily identify and remember your brand, thereby building trust and reputation in the market. Following the Brand Guidelines correctly not only improves communication effectiveness but also helps build a strong and consistent brand image.
What elements does the Brand Guideline include?
Brand Guideline is an essential document that helps businesses maintain consistency and synchronization in brand communication and promotion. Although each Brand Guideline may have different guidelines and regulations depending on the specifics and needs of each business, most Brand Guidelines include several common characteristics, creating structure and direction. Essential guidance for brand management. Below are the main contents that often appear in a Brand Guideline:
- Business Overview: This section provides an overview of the business, including its history, mission, core values, goals, and operating principles. This is the foundation for understanding the nature and direction of the brand.
- Mission: Make the business’s commitments to customers and the community. Mission is what a business strives to do to meet the needs and desires of target customers.
- Brand Voice: This section briefly describes the brand’s development direction and how the brand wants to communicate with the public. This is the basis for building communications documents and materials, helping the brand express its identity clearly and consistently.
- Business Logo: Regulations on how to design and use the business logo. Includes size limits, colors, space around the logo, layout on different backgrounds, and things to avoid when using the logo to ensure consistency and accurate recognition.
- Color Palette: Regulations on the colors used for the brand, including priority order and color combinations. Color palettes help maintain uniformity across all brand materials and communications.
- Writing Style: Provide rules for font style, and how to design main titles, subheadings, paragraphs, and quotes. Writing style helps create uniformity in a business’s communications and advertising materials.
- Images: Guides how to use images in documents and communications. Includes examples of appropriate types of images and rules on types of images that are not allowed, to ensure quality and consistency of communication materials.
- Communications Publication Standards: Includes regulations on the design and use of envelopes, business cards, presentation content, gift publications, emails, notes, faxes, and other documents. This helps maintain consistency across all of your publications and communications tools.
Brand Guideline is not only a design guide, but also an effective brand management tool, helping businesses create and maintain a consistent and professional brand image in all communications and advertising activities.
In addition, we also have other extremely useful information such as Build a brand positioning strategy.
Brand guidelines play a huge role in businesses
Understanding the basics of Brand Guidelines is an important step, but understanding the importance of brand guidelines to your entire business is even more important. Below are the specific roles of the Brand Guidelines:
Contributes greatly to building a corporate brand
Brand Guideline plays an important role in providing complete information about the brand to stakeholders, from senior managers to junior staff. This set of standards helps shape the core elements of the brand, including:
- Brand essence: Outstanding characteristics that help distinguish the brand from competitors in the market, while also matching the needs and characteristics of the target audience.
- Brand mission: Orients the business’s actions to achieve development goals in each stage.
- Brand positioning: How businesses create a unique position for their brand, helping customers distinguish the brand among millions of other names on the market.
Thanks to Brand Guidelines, businesses can build a complete brand story, creating a strong connection between the brand and customers, and helping customers easily identify the brand in a sea of goods and services. service.
Helps customers easily cover brand activities
One of the reasons why big brands are so successful and recognizable is because of the consistency in their operations. To achieve this, businesses need clear and detailed Brand Guidelines.
Brand Guidelines include standards for logo design, slogans, images, typography, brand colors, and other elements. This set of standards is applied uniformly to all marketing and communication campaigns of the brand. Thanks to that, businesses ensure consistency in all activities, from Online Marketing to traditional media campaigns.
Optimize brand promotion campaign time and budget
Possessing a clear set of brand standards helps businesses save significant time and budget. Instead of having to design or come up with new ideas for each campaign, businesses need to apply the standards identified in the Brand Guidelines. This not only makes the design and content production process faster but also reduces risks and errors.
Furthermore, Brand Guidelines are also a solid foundation for communication campaigns. Businesses can apply this set of standards to maintain consistency across many channels, thereby increasing brand recognition and maintaining the “top of mind” position in customers’ minds. This is an effective and budget-saving way in the long term, helping businesses sustainably strengthen their brand.
A few principles to keep in mind when creating a Brand guideline
Understanding the role of Brand Guidelines in brand performance, brand managers need to ensure that they build a clear and consistent set of brand standards. To achieve this, creating Brand Guidelines cannot be based on emotions but needs to follow certain principles.
Design the Logo according to the rules
The logo is considered the representative face, carrying the brand’s outstanding personality traits conveyed through symbols. This is one of the most important elements of the Brand Guideline, representing a comprehensive view of your brand. Designing a logo for a brand not only needs to ensure difference and impression but also needs a set of instructions for using the logo as a general standard for all media publications. Specific regulations include the standard size and color of the logo, the minimum accepted size, variations of the logo such as color versions, black and white, with borders,… how to mix logo colors on colored backgrounds. Different colors, distances, and positions of the logo in media publications, and things to avoid when using the logo such as changing the font, color, and shape of the logo. Based on this common standard, marketing campaigns will be guaranteed to be consistent and effectively increase brand recognition.
Choose consistent colors
One of the equally important factors in the Brand Guideline is the brand color. Characteristic colors help businesses convey messages, and values and connect emotions with customers. For example, Coca-Cola features a happy red color, Grab stands out with a friendly green color, and Diana impresses with a feminine pink color. If a brand does not have a certain brand color palette, media publications will become confusing with many different colors. Such a lack of consistency and synchronization makes customers confused in identifying and remembering the brand.
Suitable font
Besides logos and brand colors, fonts also play an important role in brand designs. Each typeface will contribute to expressing the unique personality of each brand. For example, Vietnam Airlines’ straight and minimalist font shows professionalism and elegance. In contrast, Vietjet Air, with its italic font and many curved lines, shows a dynamic and youthful personality. Depending on the purpose and communication audience, the brand should clearly define in the Brand Guidelines which is the main font and which is the additional font. More specifically, there should be general standards in font use, such as font size, spacing between characters, spacing between rows and paragraphs, and title format.
Brand image must be authentic
Brand image is one of the factors that helps attract customers’ attention. Images not only need to be designed professionally and impressively but also must ensure consistency. Businesses need to set specific standards in designing images for media publications by answering questions such as what is the main color of the image, using photos or animation, and conceptual images. specifically, and what visual effects are allowed. Setting common image standards aims to create consistency and synchronization in the brand’s communication publications, while image orientation also helps employees be creative without going beyond the scope. general is in place. For example, Coca-Cola’s series of media publications always remind users of the color and flavor of the product.
Overall, Brand Guidelines are an indispensable tool to help businesses maintain and develop their brands in a sustainable, effective, and consistent manner.
Brand Guidelines communicate your brand values to internal businesses, external partners, and the general public. Without a clear set of brand standards, a business will have difficulty maintaining consistency across all of its operations. Hopefully, the sharing from Optimal Agency has helped you better understand Brand Guidelines as well as the principles of building a professional brand identity!
Please refer to:
- Meta ads advertising standards 2024 businesses need to know
- What is Emotional branding? How to build Emotional Branding?
- Complete guide to Google Smart Shopping advertising in 2024
Frequently asked questions
Creating Brand Guidelines is suitable for all types of businesses, regardless of size or industry. From startups to large corporations, Brand Guidelines help ensure consistency in conveying brand images and messages. Businesses in the retail, service, technology, or manufacturing sectors can all take advantage of Brand Guidelines to build a strong, recognizable brand image and make a good impression on customers.
Brand Guidelines have a significant influence on buyer psychology by creating a consistent and recognizable brand image. When brands maintain consistency in logo, color, and communication style, it helps build trust and better recognition in the minds of customers. A brand with clear standards is often considered more professional and trustworthy, thereby making customers feel secure and easier to make shopping decisions. This consistency not only helps build loyalty but also increases consumer preference for the brand’s products and services.
